“As if for the first time, indeed, creation noiselessly sank into and through me its placid and untellable lesson.”

Presenting contemplation as a wordless lesson received from creation · Specimen Days, Hours for the Soul

• Faith
• Nature

“Night transcends, for that purpose, what the proudest day can do.”

Giving night a special power to awaken inward perception · Specimen Days, Hours for the Soul

• Faith
• Nature

“I am convinced there are hours of Nature, especially of the atmosphere, mornings and evenings, address'd to the soul.”

Describing certain moments in nature as directly spiritual · Specimen Days, Hours for the Soul

• Faith
• Nature

“I thought the morning and evening warble of birds delightful; but I find I can listen to these strange insects with just as much pleasure.”

Expanding musical attention from celebrated birdsong to humble insect sound · Specimen Days, Locusts and Katy-Dids

• Joy
• Music
• Nature

“Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think.”

Inviting reflective companionship with trees · Specimen Days, The Lesson of a Tree

• Nature
• Solitude

“Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing.”

Admiring the silent sufficiency of a living tree · Specimen Days, The Lesson of a Tree

• Nature
• Solitude

“What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming.”

Reading the tree as an emblem of being rather than appearance · Specimen Days, The Lesson of a Tree

• Nature
• Truth

“Perhaps the inner never-lost rapport we hold with earth, light, air, trees, &c., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only, but through the whole corporeal body.”

Insisting that our bond with nature is bodily as well as intellectual · Specimen Days, A Sun-Bath—Nakedness

• Nature
• Truth

“Somehow I seem'd to get identity with each and every thing around me, in its condition.”

Describing the self as momentarily continuous with the surrounding world · Specimen Days, A Sun-Bath—Nakedness

• Nature
• Truth

“Never before did I get so close to Nature; never before did she come so close to me.”

Expressing an unusually intimate sense of communion with nature · Specimen Days, A Sun-Bath—Nakedness

• Nature
• Solitude

“Come, ye disconsolate, in whom any latent eligibility is left—come get the sure virtues of creek-shore, and wood and field.”

Recording the restorative effect of sustained time outdoors · Specimen Days, A Sun-Bath—Nakedness

• Hope
• Nature

“I sit here in solitude with Nature—open, voiceless, mystic, far removed, yet palpable, eloquent Nature.”

Finding companionship and eloquence in silent nature · Specimen Days, A Sun-Bath—Nakedness

• Nature
• Solitude

“It seems indeed as if peace and nutriment from heaven subtly filter into me as I slowly hobble down these country lanes and across fields, in the good air.”

Describing nature as a source of bodily and spiritual renewal · Specimen Days, A Sun-Bath—Nakedness

• Hope
• Nature

“Every object has its lesson, enclosing the suggestion of everything else.”

Finding the larger world reflected in ordinary natural things · Specimen Days, Mulleins and Mulleins

• Nature
• Truth

“Its interior history will not only never be written.”

Recognising that the private reality of war resists complete historical recovery · Specimen Days, The Real War Will Never Get in the Books

• Memory
• War

“The real war will never get in the books.”

Acknowledging that the deepest realities of war escape official history · Specimen Days, The Real War Will Never Get in the Books

• Memory
• War

“The master sees greatness and health in being part of the mass; nothing will do as well as common ground.”

Finding strength in belonging rather than exclusiveness · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Friendship
• Truth

“Law is the unshakable order of the universe forever.”

Placing human ideas of law within a larger cosmic order · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Nature
• Truth

“Democracy too is law, and of the strictest, amplest kind.”

Rejecting the notion that democracy means an absence of order · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Hope
• Truth

“We present freedom as sufficient in its scientific aspect, cold as ice, reasoning, deductive, clear and passionless as crystal.”

Defending freedom on rational as well as emotional grounds · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Hope
• Truth

“to train communities through all their grades, beginning with individuals and ending there again, to rule themselves.”

Defining democratic government as education in self-government · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Hope
• Truth

“I say the mission of government, henceforth, in civilized lands, is not repression alone, and not Authority alone.”

Rejecting government conceived chiefly as restraint · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Hope
• Truth

“not merely to rule, to repress disorder, &c., but to develop, to open up to cultivation, to encourage the possibilities of all beneficent and manly outcroppage”

Seeing government as a means of developing human capacities · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Hope
• Truth

“I well know, how the gist of this fiercest and most resolute of the world's war-like contentions resided exclusively in the unnamed, unknown rank and file.”

Shifting the meaning of war from leaders to ordinary participants · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Memory
• War